Xbox One: Backwards compatibility prank breaks console

By Keith Stuart, The Guardian

Monday, December 9, 2013

In video games the following rule should be accepted as a universal truth: if something seems too good to be true, it’s probably going to break your console. Since last week, a supposed hack for the Xbox One has been circulating on forums and across social media. Claiming to unlock the new console’s ability to play Xbox 360 titles, the button input sequence allows users to access the developer menu that every Xbox One machine has hidden away. However, what the six-step process actually does is lock your £430 purchase into an endless reboot cycle, effectively destroying it.

Microsoft has confirmed that there is no hidden backwards compatibility on the Xbox One console – it simply will not play Xbox 360 games. Xbox One spokesman Larry Hyrb tweeted on Friday:

To be clear there is no way to make your Xbox One backwards compatible & performing steps to attempt this could make your console inoperable

The prank is thought to have originated on the notorious 4Chan message board, an anarchic yet hugely popular forum originally set up as a discussion centre for Japanese comics and animation. However, the site’s users have been responsible for a string of internet jokes, memes and hoaxes. This year they tricked some iPhone owners into believing that the iOS7 update would make their handset waterproof. It’s not clear how many people actually fell for the hoax, although Twitter saw several angry and frustrated messages, seemingly from people with ex-iPhones.

Fraud fiesta

This is not the first high-profile scam to hit Xbox fans since the machine’s launch on 22 November. Nottingham teenager Peter Clatworthy was duped into paying £450 for a photo of an Xbox One after misreading a cunningly titled offer on the auction site. Ebay later said the sale broke its rules and that it would pursue the seller for a refund. Sensing a PR opportunity, however, Clatworthy’s local branch of computer game retailer CEX later presented him with a free machine.

The 4Chan Xbox One prank, however, raises two interesting issues. First, the site’s users clearly understand the demand for backwards compatibility among many gamers who don’t want to keep both a new and an old console under their TV – or who are coming to a console series for the first time and want to play older titles that are usually better than the launch line-up for a fresh console. Neither the Xbox One not the PlayStation 4 are natively backwards compatible, although it is likely both will eventually make classic last-generation games available for digital download.

Second, is the access to the Xbox One’s developer environment. Microsoft has made a big deal of the fact that every one of its new consoles can also be used for developing games, meaning that smaller studios won’t have to purchase a full official development kit, which can often cost around £20,000. However, the fact that non-developers can access the development environment with a sequence of button presses and then essentially brick their consoles, has led some to question the machine’s security. Although, by the counter argument is that users probably shouldn’t get as far as inputting a series of commands into their new hardware simply because the internet told them to.